


Depletion

by tosca1390



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-29
Updated: 2010-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-14 15:57:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/150977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tosca1390/pseuds/tosca1390
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"After all, you’ve made me in your image."</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Depletion

**Author's Note:**

> For [](http://r-becca.livejournal.com/profile)[**r_becca**](http://r-becca.livejournal.com/), who requested: **Ginny Weasley + HP + The Feminine Mystique + charcoal gray**.

*

Tom picked her because she was a girl.

Or rather, he said, as the strength trickled out of her from every pore, leaving her grey and cold on solid stone, he wanted a girl for this particular purpose. Girls were so easy to manipulate, you know, all girlish dreams and fantasies and pains and longings; emotional to extremes, they could feed him like no other, keep him strong, revive him into his former-former self.

“Girls as a species act so frail,” he said, tall and lean and towering over her. His eyes, green and narrow, pierced her. “But they have a power made for conquest, if they would only tap into it.”

Ginny watched him through the dim shadows, breathing shallow and faint. The diary lay so close; she curled her fingers, struggling to reach it, wishing so hard that she could reach out and hurt him, _hurt_ him as he’d hurt Hermione, and Colin, and how he wanted to hurt Harry, oh not Harry—

He crouched next to her, his face close enough for her to feel his sour breath on her cheek, warm and smelling of death. “You did well by me, Ginny,” he murmured. “I will remember it.”

It was charming, and romantic, to be remembered, to be important—but not by him, she thought, desperately wanting to claw at his face, to summon whatever mystical power he had fed on from deep inside of her. “I hate you,” she whispered instead, soft and sharp and hoarse.

He laughed; chills shuddered through her, as grey seeped over her vision, clouding towards black. “Then you only hate yourself. After all, you’ve made me in your image,” he said, chucking her under the chin with his slim ghostly fingers.

She passed out with his touch still cold and lingering on her skin.

*

When she stepped back into the world, with Harry young and bloodied and wide-eyed crouched next to her, she looked for Tom, first.

Harry was saying her name, and Tom was dead, and a part of her was gone, just like that. Everything was slow and muted, smudged lines and watermarks of a reality; she was swallowed in a grey world, disjointed and empty. Even if it had been used for Tom’s evil purposes, that diary had been a part of her, deep and entrenched.

Her parents were at a loss, her brothers were silent, and she couldn’t look at Harry or Hermione, filled with guilt or anger or both. She passed from Hogwarts to the train to home without feeling a moment of the days and hours, lost without that piece of herself. Her insides were a mystery; the power she might have had was gone with a bloodied diary and narrow green eyes, and she didn’t know whether she’d ever get it back.

Molly blamed the weather, rain and rain and more rain; they went to Egypt.

For the first few days, while her brothers sucked in the sun and sand, Bill took Ginny off with him, away from her parents’ suffocating gazes.

“Reckoned you might want to be on your own,” he said, smiling down at her, his strong arm sprawled around her shoulder. “This is an especially amazing site, just found recently. Broke the curses on it myself.”

“What is it?” she asked, letting him lead her into the entrance, shivering at the rush of cold air.

“It’s dedicate to the witches of the ancient times. Some of them were in the royal family, you know,” he said, eyes kind, his hand moving to the crown of her hair. “The hieroglyphs tell their stories.”

She walked inwards, breath halted in her chest. His hand fell from her, as she left him a ways behind.

“The others wouldn’t like it. But I reckoned you would,” he said after a moment, voice low.

Looking back, she gave him a small smile. “I do, it’s brilliant.”

Bill smiled, his teeth white and bright in the shadowed corridor. “Don’t go too far in. I’ll just be a few tents away.”

Alone, she spent hours in the tomb, in the comforting darkness. Surrounded by cool stone and the air faintly smelling of death, she breathed deeply, touched her fingers to the hieroglyphs. Women from millennia ago lay scratched on the walls around her, women who remained strong even in death.

She didn’t know how to do it, to come back from Tom and all he drained out of her.

But she could do her best.

*  



End file.
